The present invention relates generally to storage networks, and more particularly to techniques for centralized configuration management for servers, switches, and disk subsystems in storage networks.
Today, we have seen an explosive increase in data such as e-mails, web contents and so forth. In this situation, we face the difficulty of managing ever increasing amounts of data housed inside data centers while concurrently reducing the TCO (Total Cost of Ownership). Presently, Storage Area Networks (SANs), one type of networked storage solution, have become a common way to resolve the issues of managing the data and reducing the TCO. By applying the SANs to the data center, one of the benefits is “Storage Consolidation”, that is, to share a single or a few large disk subsystems across a lot of servers or applications.
While SANs can achieve storage consolidation, opportunities for further improvements exist. For example, many SAN, devices, such as servers, switches, and disk subsystems, are in a SAN. Sometimes different IT administrators manage different devices, for example, IT managers for servers and IT managers for disk subsystems are different. In this situation, it is very difficult to keep a consistent configuration for all the SAN devices in a SAN.
What is needed are improved techniques for managing configurations within centralized storage management systems.